The financial services industry is experiencing a major transformation, where the success of the entire enterprise is dependent on a bank’s ability to quickly and non-intrusively serve their customers’ needs. Today, we’re entering a new age where unhappy customers can instantly express their dissatisfaction for a brand across the Internet at the speed of light. Moving forward, banking institutions will need more than a clever marketing spin to build and maintain a positive brand; they will need to protect their customers, enhance the customer experience and improve overall customer satisfaction, all at the same time.

Doing this over the telephone channel requires the ability to authenticate callers without hitting them with a bunch of knowledge-based authentication (KBA) questions before customers can even clarify their needs to call center agents. While KBA has long been used to identify customers over the phone, this method has become outdated, and is no longer predictive of identity. In fact, for banks that rely on KBA and personally identifiable information (PII) to identify customers over the telephone, the good work that fraud teams are doing to create a positive customer experience is being undermined by highly intrusive phone interrogations. This sets the wrong tone with customers and prospects. As a result, banks are:

 

• Putting themselves and their customers at risk of phone fraud and social engineering schemes
• Not respecting the customer’s time by requiring them to initially answer a bunch of security questions
• Increasing call center operating expenses by adding seconds to the average handle time (AHT)
• Doing great harm to their customers’ trust and goodwill by creating an unpleasant experience

In today’s digital age, to build a strong brand and improve the larger, more profitable bank-customer relationship, financial institutions need to provide a new level of customer care that eliminates unnecessary and costly banking procedures.

At TrustID, we are committed to making the telephone channel safe for financial institutions and businesses to serve their customers. By automatically validating the customer before the call is answered, the TrustID® network-based Physical Caller Authentication eliminates the need for customer interrogations at the beginning of each call. By using the phone as a valid “Something you have” authentication credential for identifying customers, we’re also helping banks improve the overall customer experience.

Over the next several years, brands will be defined by how banks protect and treat their customers. In an environment where every customer touch counts, none more so than the most personal channel, the telephone, a bank’s ability to quickly serve customers will have a huge impact on how banking customers perceive their brand. Financial institutions that understand this, and take steps to alter their banking processes to invisibly improve safety and the customer experience, will gain a hard-won competitive advantage by retaining existing customers and earning the business of new ones.

Tags: AHT, authentication credentials, average handle time, bank fraud, bank security, call center fraud, caller authentication, customer care, customer experience, customer satisfaction, KBA, knowledge-based authentication, personally identifiable information, phone fraud, Physical Caller Authentication, PII, telephone authentication, telephone channel, TrustID